The Best Letters of Charles Lamb eBook

It was never good times in England since the poor
began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly
they jogged on with as little reflection as horses;
the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his
brother that neighed. Now the biped carries a
box of phosphorus in his leather breeches; and in
the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals
his magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half
the country is grinning with new fires. Farmer
Graystock said something to the touchy rustic that
he did not relish, and he writes his distaste in flames.
What a power to intoxicate his crude brains, just
muddlingly awake, to perceive that something is wrong
in the social system; what a hellish faculty above
gunpowder!

Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted, we shall
see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always
revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There
is a love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected
clod that was trod into earth, that was nothing, on
a sudden by damned arts refined into an exterminating
angel, devouring the fruits of the earth and their
growers in a mass of fire! What a new existence;
what a temptation above Lucifer’s! Would
clod be anything but a clod if he could resist it?
Why, here was a spectacle last night for a whole country,—­a
bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers,
and shaking the Monument with an ague fit: all
done by a little vial of phosphor in a clown’s
fob! How he must grin, and shake his empty noddle
in clouds, the Vulcanian epicure! Can we ring
the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that
pretend to civilize, and then burn the world?
There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the
drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the
boor that phosphor will not ignite?

Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable,
lie smoking ashes and chaff, which man and beast would
sputter out and reject like those apples of asphaltes
and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of
earth will quickly disappear. Hot rolls may say,
“Fuimus panes, fuit quartem-loaf, et ingens
gloria Apple-pasty-orum.” That the good
old munching system may last thy time and mine, good
un-incendiary George, is the devout prayer of thine,
to the last crust,

CH. LAMB.

CV.

TO DYER.

February 22, 1831.

Dear Dyer,—­Mr. Rogers and Mr. Rogers’s
friends are perfectly assured that you never intended
any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the revivification
of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever.
To imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods
over a fantastic expression of more than thirty years’
standing, would be to suppose him indulging his “Pleasures
of Memory” with a vengeance. You never penned
a line which for its own sake you need, dying, wish
to blot. You mistake your heart if you think
you can write a lampoon. Your whips are